Rain
by footshooter
Summary: Let's travel back to the start, when the Joker had not long been in Gotham. When he was still nothing other than a man passing unnoticed like the thousands of others in the city. When he didn't mean anything to anyone, and especially not the Bat. Rated for swearing and the odd bit of violent thought processes.


Jack likes the rain. And he's Jack at the moment. He likes the way the city turns dark and the clouds crowd together in the sky, blackened and heavy. He likes how the streetlights flicker on during the day; first a bright white, then settling into orange. He likes how the air takes on a certain quality, and how, if you lick your lips you can taste the moisture. He likes how it sends people scurrying for cover; staring at the ground and covering their heads with bags, umbrellas or hoods.

No one spares him a glance, and that makes dull, banal tasks such as food shopping a hell of a lot easier.

Jack would like to throw down his hood and let the rain flow down his face, but he can't because people would _stare_. And the staring would lead to questions and, quite frankly, it takes a lot of effort to simply leave the house _to_ get food as it is because it's just so _boring_.

Jack doesn't like things that lack originality. He doesn't like repetitive tasks that people perform because they _have_ to. He doesn't like work, he doesn't like families (he _especially _doesn't like families), and he doesn't like idle chat or anything like that. And he really doesn't like it when people stop in the middle of whatever meaningless operation they're doing to gawp at his face and do that sympathetic _cringe_ that they always, _always_ manage to do.

He really _hates_ that.

The rain helps because, while he is happy to become soaked to the bone and revel in the chaos and the taste and the smells, other people, well, they just can't handle it. It's cold, his clothes stick to him, and the only people left out brush past him without so much as a second glance to the tall-ish man in the purple hoodie.

Not that it looks purple saturated, of course, it looks more black than anything.

Although, we should get some things straight here. Jack's a lie. Or, at least, he might be. Jack Napier may never have existed, his whole history could be fabricated, leaving behind a man who finds everything funny and has a pretty carved up face. The man under the Jack-mask doesn't know nor understand who he was before that, it was just a name that came to him and stuck.

And, well, his hoodie saturating is kinda annoying because, let's face it, black is boring.

Which in itself is an irony, because the whole reason he is _in_ this city is to do with a man who clads himself in black armour and flies across the rooftops in the dead of night beating criminals to a pulp. He couldn't miss out on a joke as classic as that one.

And the city, well, the city is good for him. And for Jack. Because in Gotham no one really spares him a glance. People in cities are so wrapped up in themselves and their own business that they don't look too deeply at other people. A fact which Jack finds horrifying and yet can understand. If you don't look at other people you don't have to care about them. If you don't have to care then you can spend your time in your own little world worrying about your own little problems and not how the hell that guy managed to get his face carved up like that.

It's easier for him when people don't stare, but it's also kinda sad. There's no community spirit in a city and that's gonna make his task so much easier to complete. And he only has one task.

Get to the Batman.

He'd like to show that guy a good time; give him an equal. He'd like to show him that the world is a funny place, and that everything doesn't have to be mundane and _so very_ _serious_ and very, very _black_. He's gonna inject a bit of colour, and he imagines the first splash of it is gonna be red.

And cities are so crowded and so very easy to damage. Blocks can fall with simple charges, leaving dust and debris and tearing people from people like his whole _past_ was torn from him.

Jack looks up and sees the cities major celebrity climbing out of an overly flashy sports car in front of him. He regularly amuses himself with magazines where he plays the "how much did Bruce Wayne spend on…" game. The man has an actual _butler_ and the poor guy had to climb out into the rain first (even though he probably shouldn't risk hypothermia at his age) to grab Mr Wayne's umbrella and prevent his _hair_ from getting wet.

Jack's hair is long, greasy and, under the water's illusion of darkness, blond. Nothing lies in its place – it probably doesn't even have one and it amuses him to see Wayne preening with concern reserved only for the mind-numbingly stupid. His _suit _is pressed and probably cost more than what was stored in the last mob-bank he'd hit.

He was getting desperately bored of ripping off the mob, but things were going to change for the better soon.

The Joker laughed to himself as Bruce Wayne waltzed off into a fog that can only be caused by the spray of heavy rain and the cold of winter. Bruce Wayne heard the laugh, shrill and almost inhumane, and spun around to get a glimpse of whoever it was. All he could see was a hunched silhouette; a man, standing in the rain, no discernable features and the _noise_. He turned back to Alfred and brushed it off as nothing, hurrying to his meeting.

That was his first mistake, and one he'd live to regret.

The rain got heavier and Jack stood, feeling as though he was the only person left in the world; people hiding in their houses and their images and sounds drowned out by the water bouncing off tarmac and running down into drains. It was probably the only pure thing in the fucking city, and Jack needed to know that it was actually real when he was surrounded by so much _fake_. He needed to taste it as it ran into his mouth and feel it against his skin, chilling him to the core…

Jack pulled his hood down and began to walk, stopping only to throw a card into a puddle near Bruce Wayne's back tyre. He hopped a fence and scurried back home, shopping forgotten for now because he had a feeling that the time was _right_ and he needed to start _doing_ things.

He needed to shed his disguise and start being noticed as the Joker, because his time was here and the Bat needed to know he'd arrived so that they could get started. He was gonna play cat and flying mouse for a while and then stab the rodent through the heart and let him bleed out into the gutter like the rain was doing now.

Because the only thing he hated about rain was the _hope_ it brought when it ended. The blue sky that symbolised everything could get better. Gotham, and all of its worthless human population, symbolised this _Bat _as its _hope_. And it was, quite frankly, hilarious. And pathetic. But mainly funny.

The Joker was going to take great pleasure in ripping the hope from their hands and leaving the city to rot after he did.

He just had to pull off everything that came with it, too.


End file.
